Skip to main content

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

  • NEWS AND VIEWS

Give physicians’ views to improve COVID vaccine uptake

Informing people once about physicians’ views on COVID-19 vaccination improves vaccination rates by 4 percentage points after 9 months. This finding suggests that light-touch educative nudges can have lasting positive effects.
  1. Nina Mažar

    1. Nina Mažar is at the Questrom School of Business, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215, USA.

    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed  Google Scholar

The development, production and distribution of an effective vaccine against the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 was an unprecedented effort, involving billions of dollars’ worth of investment. Countries now face another challenge: how to convince everyone to take it. Distrust of and misinformation about the vaccine, about health and state agencies, and about experts has contributed to vaccine hesitancy1. Writing in Nature, Bartoš et al.2 report that vaccine uptake can be boosted through a one-time intervention: communicating physicians’ actual views on COVID-19 vaccination.

Access options

Rent or buy this article

Prices vary by article type

from$1.95

to$39.95

Learn more

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Nature 606, 471-472 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-01305-x

References

  1. Roy, D. N., Biswas, M., Islam, E. & Azam, M. S. PLoS ONE 17, e0265496 (2022).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  2. Bartoš, V., Bauer, M., Cahlíková, J. & Chytilová, J. Nature 606, 542–549 (2022).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Blendon, R. J., Benson, J. M. & Hero, J. O. N. Engl. J. Med. 371, 1570–1572 (2014).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Sunstein, C. R. Nature Hum. Behav. 6, 9–10 (2022).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Batteux, E., Mills, F., Jones, L. F., Symons, C. & Weston, D. Vaccines 10, 386 (2022).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Mažar, N. & Soman, D. Behavioral Science in the Wild (Univ. Toronto Press, 2022).

    Google Scholar 

  7. List, J. A. The Voltage Effect (Penguin Random House, 2022).

    Google Scholar 

  8. Kettle, S., Hernandez, M., Sanders, M., Hauser, O. & Ruda, S. Behav. Sci. 7, 28 (2017).

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Pennycook, G. et al. Nature 592, 590–595 (2021).

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Competing Interests

The author declares no competing interests.

Subjects

Latest on:

Nature Careers

Jobs

Nature Briefing

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Get the most important science stories of the day, free in your inbox. Sign up for Nature Briefing

Search

Advanced search

Quick links